I was thinking today, as I spent the afternoon playing around with ProBuilder in Unity3d, working on some game props. A crate isn't really anything special, 3d model-wise, but it's a quick way to familiarize yourself with the basic tools. It's basically the "Hello, World!" of 3d modeling. I have a huge number of textures laying around and thought I'd take advantage of that while I check out ProBuilder. You can use your own texture library or grab something from the asset store if you like....

It’s really easy to overlook religion and spirituality when constructing science fiction worlds and narratives. A lot of us think in secular terms when it comes to science and the future, so it makes sense -- it’s easy to brush off. Unfortunately, it’s not very realistic. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and part of that is bringing the spiritual identities of our ancestors with us. Sure, they change over time and evolve with us culturally, but even in some of the most esoteric of cases,...

I know what you’re thinking! How can you write neo-cyberpunk and singularity video games and not have an Evil A.I.?! Well, buckle-up because we don’t do things the way we’re expected to! The sinister, Evil A.I. is a staple of modern sci-fi and cyberpunk storytelling, almost cliche at this point, but the dark promise of a sinister AI is something that never manifested on Vegas Prime. Though possibly in deep history there may be a lurking story about something being covered up, there’s nothing...

People are often shocked that we, and the community we play with, actively report teabagging as abusive chat in multiplayer games like Overwatch. Unfortunately, the gaming community has long been a sanctuary for toxicity, feeding a range of toxic movements like gamergate and even the alt-right. I wanted to make a post to our game community about why we report the toxic players that teabag, and why we think you should do the same. When we are asked why, these are some of the things we...

It’s important to remember that Artificial Intelligence covers a broad array of topics like machine learning and function. Much like naturally occurring intelligence, our synthetic-origin intelligence takes many forms, with a varying degree of sophistication. When most people ask about “Artificial Intelligence” in Vegas Prime, they’re usually asking about human-like intelligence and sentience. We call them Cognitive Imprints.

We gave the Stasis Bay a much needed face-lift, this week. We wanted to make sure that the more boring and sparsely populated areas had something going on, something to give it texture, something that added to the character that you first experience when you play Vegas Prime Retrograde.

Despite being a rather short play area, the Stasis Bay is really important. Like really REALLY important. It’s the first thing you see when you fire up the game, it’s the first place you walk around. When...

I want to take a minute to brag about what we're doing and to invite you (and your friends!) to participate.

The Tales from Vegas Prime project is a large scale community story telling effort to build the lore of daily life on Vegas Prime. We bring together the many talented writers, editors, and aficionados in our community to weave the largest, most ambitious collaborative story we can, in a way that hasn’t been done before.

We’ve made some changes to how we’re handling stories and missions in Vegas Prime Retrograde. Vegas Prime Retrograde was originally a set of action sequences and linear missions that pulled the player through the main story line, A Dance with Venus. You started in Stasis, woke up, and progressed through a linear story line. It was ok, but it wasn’t the game that we wanted to build, you know? It wasn’t the game that we wanted to share with you.

We wanted to hang out with you guys more and what better way than a discord server? Come hang out with us! Talk video games or movies! Chat with our developers! Play games with us! We’re planning game nights, movie nights, and regular beta releases.

This week at Open Form Games has been all about privacy. Internet privacy. Today, we took steps to protect our community from the privacy overreach and inappropriate tracking behaviors of some of the 3rd party software we previously relied on. While it may seem like a small thing, we take the privacy and security of our community very seriously and are always looking for new ways we can help make their internet lives a bit easier. Today, we made three changes to our website that will...

Some things, you just don’t know until you try it. When we have to build large things or make changes to large parts of our games, we rely pretty heavily on prototyping and rapid development techniques… just in case it doesn’t work out. We wanted to share a little bit about how we prototype large scale things for Vegas Prime.

In Vegas Prime Retrograde, our city Vegas Prime, is so important that it essentially is one of the characters. The style of buildings, the layout of the streets, the...

One of our greatest inspirations for the science fiction stories we write is Carl Sagan. It's not just his deep commitment to science that inspires us, but also his romanticism. He truly echoes our desire to reach the proverbial heavens. He's one of the reasons we write what we write.

When we play games, we dream. We summon the courage of the greatest explorers and embody the heart of the greatest poets. We realize that these things are within our reach....

We added our map back in after the first round of feedback on our super secret beta of Vegas Prime Retrograde! We wanted something that echoed the visual design of the main gameplay that everyone already loves, but felt distinctly different.

This map is a standard overhead map, but rendered in 3d and displays live with the pause screen. We'll be extending it as we develop and feel things out. We're thinking about including...

Here is how we got Unity3d running on Fedora 25. It is not particularly hard, but is a bit of a chore. Pro-tip: Skip 5.6 beta for now. It has npm issues.

Install and Set Up DependenciesUnity3d has a laundry list of dependencies. Most of them were already installed (possibly due to other software we use?) but a few weren't. Here are the basics.
sudo dnf install blender gimp monodevelop nodejs npm nodejs-npm* postgresql-libs postgresql

We're doing a live #hackFEST for our Wii U game Vegas Prime Retrograde this weekend and everyone is invited! Keep your key bridge terminals aligned here for our developer live streams, progress updates, Q&A and shenanigans this FRIDAY from noon to midnight EST. Join our Vegas Prime Retrograde #hackFest group to ask questions about the game, our process, our plans, or for advice on your own projects! We'll be setting this insanity up this week and sharing...

One of the first things you learn in Vegas Prime Retrograde is that NO CARRIER is a badass. While you spend the bulk of the surface level battling her on the streets of Vegas Prime, in the Stasis Bay, you only get a brief taste of what she can do.

NO CARRIER is pretty brutal and her COMLINK has been stored in a stasis loop field in this bay. LOGISTICS leads you to it and you have to bring down the stasis field and hack her COMLINK before it dials home to NO...

We've been hard at work on our Stasis demo, a demo of the first level of Vegas Prime Retrograde for you guys. We're updating our audio, missions, and gameplay to fix some problems the community found. It's a lot of work, but we think it'll be worth it!

In this screenshot, you're looking at the core of the Stasis bay, the Stasis Interface Board. The mission is to hack the Stasis Interface Board to turn off the stasis pod door fields. One of our goals is to teach the...

We thought we'd share a sneak peak of our effort re-imagining our old arcade game Xamalga for #ScreenshotSaturday! It's one of our more popular games at conventions and people frequently team up for impromptu multiplayer on our giant touch screen. We love our Xamalga fans, so we wanted to make something for them.

The new version of Xamalga will be built for console gamepads as well as touch interfaces, with new baddies and new gameplay mechanics. It'll be just as easy to hit the ground...

When we design new levels, we like to prototype them first to see how they feel. That's what we've been doing with a new level in Vegas Prime Retrograde! We try to make sure it looks right, sounds right, and walking around it feels like it could exist somewhere. Then we make sure that a game could take place there, and that the layout and feel add something to the gameplay. We don't want to have a beautiful level simply for beauty sake, but it has to really add to an experience in some...